“It's a condition, go find a physician, he'll make you a salve, Will,” I told him a hundred times if once.
“Nay,” says he. “Think you it's a serpigo ravages this phiz?” he'd say. “Nay, Pinky my sweet Jew, I 'trow my skin announces what's proved by this French crown emerging on my pate's stage. It's the treatment of the hot tub for Will Kempe!” he says.
In which he was mistaken, since I think he was only naturally losing his hairs, not from French pox about which he worried so much right to when he died in my arms. So sure I was it ain't a French crown he had, I never once refused to drink from his cup when he offered, which I'll tell more. And don't I wear a ring made from his hairs to remember him on my finger?
Also his beard was only a scraggle. Me, Pincus Perlmutter, since I was a boychick I got a bart like a man, a wise and learned don from Oxford I would be with the bart I got growing on my face, so white like snow now.
So, hard-favored he was, the best I can tell you because nobody made his picture except one woodcut I got made for Nine Days Wonder, which shows him dancing to Tom Sly's tabor and pipe with his bells and streamers on his puff sleeves, but in this you can't really see how he looked, not a good likeness, much less see his dancing! But in part, however a little one, that's how he was so funny to hit your spleen when you seen him perform a dance, to where you didn't know to laugh or cry, both come from your spleen of course, because he's so hard-favored you want to laugh and at the same time weep for a man so hard-favored ugly. Lacheln im tsoris. Laugh from grief, which I knew since way from shtetl where the Moscovies came to do pogram by our village.
His hairs on his head, before they started to come off—not from pox, not a French crown!--he crimped with the hot iron and cut to look like the Fool's coxcomb hat, which of course he wore when he danced or played a stage.
Raiment, his dress when he wasn't attired in the parti-color motley to dance or otherwise perform was like his punim, not impressive to see, but also part of how he was just from appearance funny and also sad too. Pantaloons sometimes he wore, an old costume from when he played the comic character, and loose slops, greasy breeches too big for his legs and tusch they were. No fancy lace points on his doublet or jerkin he never word—who can afford with what he spent on jades and tippling? His gaskins he wore if they were tore or not—I'll say he was not a person liked a bath even in summer. However, plenty machers from Court I knew didn't smell no sweeter than my Will Kempe!
I'll also say he was never shy from breaking his wind among persons who happened to be gathered. Like a plowhorse fed bran he broke his wind! And I'm honest to say he wasn't always such a polite person, that he made his water right in the fireplace instead of like a gentle person going outside or to the jakes or asking for the Jordan pot under the beds they keep in inn chambers so the fireplace shouldn't stink bad. Especially if he was cupshotten fap drunk my Will did this in the fireplace.
But his buskins were from the best quality to buy in London, since his fortune—mine also!--he made with his two feet dancing, so here we didn't stint any. Good leather and comfortable, a smacking sound they made when he danced, on a stage-board or the road cobbles, on the dirt from an inn courtyard the same. The pair he wore the nine days Morris to Norwich, they nailed up like a monument for him on the wall from the Lord Mayor's Hall, and I'll confess I went to take them down to keep for a memory after he starb in my arms, but already some verfluchte gonif it was stole them already, they were gone when I came, and nobody knew from nothing they said when I asked.
“The boots from Will Kempe what he wore in 1600,” I said to them, “they should be a treasure, I want for a memory!”
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